These deft, nuanced, and unmannered translations of Kim Eon Hee's poems introduce a genuinely exciting poet to the English-speaking world, one whose work reveals for us the limitations of our conceptions of what poetry is and the colonial legacies that structure our basic concepts of poetry, such as the gendered and raced expectations of the poetic speaker and of what counts as "experimental" writing. Kim's poetry, as the translators write, is "unafraid of graphic disappointment or the pits" she brilliantly violates our idea of what is acceptable for an Asian female poet to say out loud.
Related Subjects
Poetry